Who invited her to the party?

When Amy Wilentz moved with her family from New York to Los Angeles after 9/11, she believed they would find a more peaceful and less agitating place. What she found, of course, was that L.A. is no less complicated, no less conflicted -- and not just because of impending natural disasters. Her new book, “I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger,” will be published next week, and woven into its ruminations on California’s landscape, history and politics is a “radical chic”-style critique of Los Angeles’ dinner-partying power brokers and their quest to be considered politically and intellectually serious.

It was at the homes of these pooh-bahs -- prominent democratic fundraisers Stewart and Lynda Resnick, pundit Arianna Huffington, even actress Carrie Fisher -- that Wilentz gathered material, and the book is bound to sting many of them. “I’m the bad guest; I’m the nightmare guest,” Wilentz said as she sat in the garden of her Hancock Park home recently.

“But people knew that I was writing a book about Los Angeles,” she continued. “I hate to take the virtuous high road .... I just saw something that was interesting and I wrote about it.”

Beyond the tantalizing gossip, however, is a larger message: There is plenty of high-power intellectual life in Los Angeles, and it’s time for the largely hidden world where it takes place -- the Hollywood political fundraisers, the Westside dinner parties where the quirks and embarrassing foibles of its billionaire wannabes are on display -- to be fair game.

And so Wilentz, a journalist and author of two books -- a novel set in Israel and a nonfiction book about Haiti -- tried to part the veil. Warren Beatty and other A-list celebrities on the fundraiser circuit take their licks, as does the Governator, whom Wilentz pursues but never manages to meet. There’s a scathing glimpse of the Resnicks’ gaudy lifestyle in a Sunset Boulevard mansion, as well as the relentless self-promotion and excess of Huffington.

But even at its most over-the-top, it’s a scene that displays what Wilentz calls a hunger for knowledge. “In New York you go to a party with a group of intellectuals and they talk about their shoes, their clothes and the caterer; they gossip about literary agents, but they don’t talk about issues,” Wilentz said. “If you want to talk about what it’s like being under fire during the intifada, the reaction is: ‘Oh, please. What’s the next dinner course?’ ”

In Los Angeles, by contrast, “nobody gives a party just to have a party,” Wilentz said. “People want a thoughtful life.” Often, hosts on the intellectual circuit observe the “one-subject rule,” when guests talk about a single topic, often prompted by current events. The author attended these parties with her husband, Nick Goldberg, op-ed editor of the Los Angeles Times, and took her best shots.

For some longtime Californians, the book Wilentz has produced might smack too much of yet another New Yorker cracking jokes about the La Brea Tar Pits and other landmarks. But others see new ground being broken.

“She saw that this scene -- combining parties and serious thought -- is something that is deliberately orchestrated in Los Angeles, and she satirized it,” said Kevin Starr, author of a six-volume history of California. “It’s part of the entertainment culture and pleasure principle. In L.A., the intellectual life has migrated to the social scene.... People are very conscious about the need to have serious discussions in their social life.”

Standing atop the pyramid is Huffington, the blogger and columnist whose lavish Brentwood soirees include actors, academics, politicians and writers.

“Arianna is like a French salon hostess of the 19th century; she’s brilliant,” Wilentz said. “She wants to gather people around her with money, political power and Hollywood influence.... Sometimes her salon includes movie stars who don’t have a great knowledge of issues. But she also has people who are just so fabulously funny and great, it doesn’t matter if there’s a lot of dim bulbs hanging out there too.” (Huffington turned down a request to comment for this article.)

Wilentz is especially amused by two members of Huffington’s entourage, John-Roger and his associate, John Morton. They run the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, a New Age group that emphasizes “Soul Transcendence, Mystical Travelers, spiritual exercises, the Light, and the TISRA TIL.” (The TISRA TIL is a place allegedly at the center of the brain, not a place in Narnia.) She presents them as Huffington’s accessories, like a Hummer or a handbag.

“Arianna is like a lot of people who come here; you’re seeking something and you’re also trying to make yourself a part of the homogenous Hollywood society, and you have to make certain choices,” Wilentz said. “She’s originally Greek, she studied in England and was part of London society before she came to New York, and she’s also a Hollywood girl. She’s a chameleon. I think there are a lot of them here.”

Lower down the social food chain are the gatherings of two rival groups of L.A. intellectuals known as the Geniuses and Morons.

The Geniuses, more accurately known as members of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, is a USC-based group founded in 1998 by history professor Steven Ross and Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The group meets biweekly for lunch to discuss political issues as well as topics such as the philosophy of memory. They include Huffington, writers Susan Faludi and Mona Simpson, producer Lynda Obst and columnist Robert Scheer.

“We are people like anybody else who want to get together and have a conversation that has perhaps something to do with the inner life rather than the outer life,” said novelist and member Carolyn See. “Some might call our concerns sophomoric,” she said. “You know, the idea that there is a kind of endearing naivete out here -- this insistence that we have on discussing serious issues.”

Several years later, a rival group of Los Angeles intellectuals -- irked that they had not been invited to join the USC group -- decided to form their own. Spurred on by political journalist and blogger Mickey Kaus, they referred to the institute fellows as “Geniuses” and dubbed themselves “Morons.”

On the surface, the Morons would appear to be having a better time. Their noisy, no-holds-barred parties in private homes typically number 50 to 70 people, as opposed to the Geniuses, who hold smaller luncheons at the faculty club.

“The main thing was not to become a Westside liberal watering hole, where everybody is in the amen chorus on the same side of every issue,” said writer Ann Louise Bardach, a co-founder. “Half the group is conservative, libertarian or whatever. We didn’t want everybody talking about rent control in Santa Monica. We didn’t want everybody to be a Hollywood celebrity.”

Prominent Morons include director Taylor Hackford, Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, casting director Margery Simkin, plus a host of writers and journalists. Wilentz herself is a Moron in good standing.

About the Resnicks, who would not comment for this article, Wilentz said, “I feel bad.... I try to be polite.” But she wanted to show how this place allows certain freedoms you would not normally have when you’re trying to conform to an older culture. “If you have the ability to do anything in L.A., you don’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll be so embarrassed in front of Mrs. Astor.’ Because there is no Mrs. Astor out here.”

The Resnicks, who came to Los Angeles from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, own one of the world’s largest farming operations, based in Kern County. They are co-owners of the Franklin Mint. They also own Pom Wonderful juice and Fiji Water. Their large, sumptuous house on Sunset, dubbed Little Versailles, became an object of Wilentz’s fascinated, repulsed attention.

“Everything is grand,” she writes. “Bedroom, sitting rooms, dining room -- even though the Resnicks are tiny, exquisite people, almost miniature, like dear little forest creatures, certainly too small for their echoing residence.” Or as Lynda Resnick said when escorting the author through the vast expanses: “It’s not home, but it’s much.”

When Wilentz recently ran into Resnick, the hostess asked Wilentz what she put in the book. “I was awkward about it and she freaked,” the author said. “Understandably.”

Author Joan Didion once wrote that because she was small and unobtrusive, “People tend to forget my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Wilentz, for her part, isn’t fleeing on the next red-eye. “I’ve never really stayed in the place I’ve written about,” she said. “Usually it’s a book and a kiss goodbye. But I’m not going anywhere. This is my home now.”